


and when your stitch comes loose

by activatingAggro (pigeonfancier)



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-04
Updated: 2019-03-04
Packaged: 2019-11-09 10:09:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17999822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pigeonfancier/pseuds/activatingAggro
Summary: “Ah, ah, ah - tired? Giving up already, leh? This what dance teach? Cluck-cluck-clucking, first time you get frustrated?” you jeer, and, gods, both he and Vadaya are so fucking young. With Vadaya, you never forget that! He’s only two sweeps younger than you, take a few perigees, but he’s sheltered enough, sometimes, to pass as eight. With Iconic, he’s vicious enough that you almost forget that until he starts emoting.His eyes widen. Then his face blooms yellow like the clouds peeling back from the sun. He looks like the newly Ascended young adult he is, suddenly, instead of any other Fleet official. “I’m not giving up, sweetheart,” he purrs, words so sweet that they could be dripping venom, and something hooks hard around your ankle and jerks.As Vadaya's battery, Nanako takes it upon herself to have the shovel talk with ID.





	and when your stitch comes loose

It’s a testament to the tensile strength of Roman bioengineering that, when you land on top of the skuttlebuggy’s roof, it doesn’t do much as dent. It just chirrs, the vibration loud enough that you can feel it in your bones, and rears up, mandibles flailing. In a moment, it’ll start exuding acid from the core. To you, it’s never been note-worthy. It can’t eat through your telekinetic shell, anymore than water can permeate it.

For a normal troll, it takes thirty seconds for it to eat through the skin of their shoes, and start working on their heels.

Fortunately for you, Iconic Conetl’s never been normal.

His feet skim over the top of the roof, high enough that the acid rolls unbothered underneath. In the day’s light, he’s bleached pale, the white of his suncloak indistinguishable from the pallor of his skin. If it weren’t for the haze of his eyes, he’d look like a sun-dried corpse: as is, he just looks like a sun-washed maroon, with pink catching on the curves of his cheeks, saturating the dark of his shadows.

“You stole my phone!” he squawks, and if he looks like a corpse, at least there’s enough heat to his words to make him sound alive. Two steps, and he’s in your space. His telekinesis slides over you, prying at your fingers, but he doesn’t have the power to rip them open: it’s like when Pepper used to try to get at your candies, back when the both of you were young, and her fingers were still stumpy.

But he doesn’t stick to telekinesis. He snatches at your shoulder, fingers poised to grab hard at the fabric of your jersey - and he’s unprepared when you grab his wrist instead. If he was prepared for your strength, you don’t suppose you’d manage this. But everyone looks at the jade on your shirt and forgets that despite your size, despite your age, despite your fucking caste, you’re a part of the Imperial Psionics Corps for a reason.

As soon as he’s close, you hook your elbow around his shoulder, throw your weight in, and fling him over your shoulder. Then you’re spinning on your heel to face him, because sure enough..

You’d spent three hours watching his videos before you’d called Vadaya up. Iconic always looked less rumpled in them when he’d caught himself, somehow, then he does now. “What the fuck?” he bites off, yellow blotching across his nose like a miasma. “Give me back my phone, honeyhorns, or - hey!”

The skitterbugs are moving. And so are you, because you don’t wait for him: you just turn and launch yourself in two steps onto the roof of the next passing bug, knees bending as you dig your fingers into the keratin of the roof. “You want it back,” you call over your shoulder, “come take it back, lah. ‘less you can’t!”

And then the chase is on.

This is what you know about Iconic Conetl:

When he was almost seven sweeps, he became the head of the Temasekian Imperial Ballet, and his first formal outing in the position involved gutting someone on stage.

Comballet is a bloody sport, one dominated by clowns, and bluebloods, and the psionics they train to perform with them, as lights and background noise to accentuate the true show. It’s not one where a yellowblood should’ve risen, all things considered. It certainly isn’t one that he should’ve thrived in.

But he did! Iconic Conetl is the name that, even nearly a sweep and a half after his false death, trolls still have at the tip of their tongue. He revolutionised the sport. He proved, once and for all, that a lowblood can manage to be just as vicious, just as senselessly aggressive as any clown on the stage.

And that is why you don’t trust him with your battery leader. Oh, Vadaya’s an indigo. He’s aggressive. But he’s never flayed anyone for nothing more than some seadweller’s entertainment.

You’d watched the Wattan video, all the way through, and that’s why you’re here right now, feeling the pulse of psionics behind you all the way down in your horns. One of the first things that Basic taught you is that you need to reign in your telekinesis, hold it close to your body. It doesn’t work for you - your telekinesis is always an inch from your skin, no matter how many amplifiers you’ve got carved into your skin, or how many steroids they’ve placed in your veins. But your psi doesn’t give out the steady pulse that others do.

Iconic was never taught that to restrain in any sense. You don’t have to look back to know where he is. You can feel him like tremors in the ground each time his psionics hit a surface, and he fucking bounds. There’s something almost restive about all of this, and something deeply satisfying. Each time you hit a scuttlebuggy, it folds under the weight of you, the legs dipping low with a tension that releases to shake you off moments later. If you time it right, it’s just enough of a boost to send you flying straight for the next car.

And when the vehicles aren’t near enough, that’s fine. Ghoulisar is a crowded city. For all that the buildings are new, tall black towers of glass and steel, they tower over the street like trees, near enough that you can lunge from the car straight onto the wall. One hand balances on the glass. You sprint -

\- and then, just as gravity takes a hold of you again, you kick off of it, and directly onto the roof of a passing bus. It’s one of the rare mechanical ones, with a shell that’s more metal than keratin, and the thump of your feet hitting it is more satisfying than you expected. The way a troll leans out the window, eyes wide, is even better.

“Hi, lah!” you chirp, giving a brief wave, then fling yourself off of the edge, directly into the side of a passing truck.

You can’t feel the pulse of Iconic’s psionics in your periphery. He’s maybe three minutes back, still steadily heading towards you. Part of you’s disappointed. The rest of you.. well, it’s about what you expected. Of course he can’t keep up with you! He’s a comballerina.

It’s not exactly a wonder that his rivalry with Vadaya’s entirely verbal. He’s fluff, from top to bottom, and the only trolls he’s ever managed to scrap with are the ones bred and raised for entertainment. So you should be kind. “Ey, papaya!” you shout, hopping up in the air and waving your arms around. “Up here, up here! Before am sian jit pua, yeah?”

You can’t hear him from this far, but you can see the way he pivots to stare. So you follow it up by flashing him the bird, then you lean down, stretching as you touch your toes.

Then bend backwards to touch your heels. The buildings pass by you in a blur. There’s acid splashing across your feet, the sensation too dull for it to permeate your psionics, but that’s fine. All you have to do is wait.

By the time you straighten up, he’s bounding from one buggy to the next, each leap hard enough to make them stagger under it. He’ll be on you in a minute, if you stay right here.

So you jump off of the side of the truck instead, just as it passes a lightpole. You scramble to the top of it, balancing for one precarious moment.. and then you lunge onto the nearest building, hook your fingers into the brick of the nearest, and climb.

If this wasn’t the industrial part of town, and it wasn’t day, then some might have your hide for this. But the only buildings near you are warehouses. All of the vehicles are automated, and there’s nobody that ought to be awake at this time of day. No one’s around to see!

And that means, when you get to the top of the building, you’re free to turn around and start walking the edge. Your balance is wonderful. You don’t need to hold your arms out to the side, but you know how trolls work. Maybe Iconic wouldn’t bother to get up on the roof, if you just climbed up here.

But when you flip forward, balancing on your hands, and start pacing like that..

He skips climbing entirely. Straight from the back of the skitterbug he was on, and up to the side of the building.

You’ll give him that! It is kind of impressive, enough that you pay him the respect of flipping back onto your feet when he finally gets near.

“I’m not /chasing you/ any farther! Give me my fucking phone, Nanako,” he snaps as soon as he’s close enough to hear over the sound of traffic below. He looks winded, and this close, you can feel the frayed edges of his psionics. Of course he’s not used to actual physical activity.

He’s a ballerino. Poor thing’s probably never had real exercise in his life.

“Ah, ah, ah - tired? Giving up already, leh? This what dance teach? Cluck-cluck-clucking, first time you get frustrated?” you jeer, and, gods, both he and Vadaya are so fucking young. With Vadaya, you never forget that! He’s only two sweeps younger than you, take a few perigees, but he’s sheltered enough, sometimes, to pass as eight. With Iconic, he’s vicious enough that you almost forget that until he starts emoting.

His eyes widen. Then his face blooms yellow like the clouds peeling back from the sun. He looks like the newly Ascended young adult he is, suddenly, instead of any other Fleet official. “I’m not giving up, sweetheart,” he purrs, words so sweet that they could be dripping venom, and something hooks hard around your ankle and jerks.

Hitting the ground isn’t enough to wind you. It doesn’t even sting. The landing isn’t pretty! There’s a spray of gravel where your knee hits the concrete and it shatters underneath, but the rocks hit your shell and bounce. All it does is make you pause.

Being picked up, though, is an entirely different manner. You’re not used to fighting with telekinetics. That’s the sort of thing Vadaya handles, but it’s fine. There’s no way for Iconic to actually wound you, no matter how much his psi itches as it rolls over your shell. He can’t burst your shield.

But you can rip through his. His psi’s holding you in place, rotating you neatly as he paces around you in a circle. “I’m not going to just reach up and rifle through your pockets,” he says, all faux patience, “because, honeyhorns, we are practically clade! But!”

“I want you to know I could, and you ought to be awfully considerate of that fact. Just like I’m being considerate of the fact that it just doesn’t matter how hard I do this -” His psionics lift you high, then drops you hard. Your nose’s a scant inch from the concrete! But then he’s pulling you back up, like the world’s worst yo-yo. You’d be more impressed, you think, if you hadn’t seen this sort of thing in his videos. “- you’ll be perfectly fine. So I could bounce you like a ball! But I’m not. Because one of us here, my darling little mossball, is actually civilized.”

“So I’ll just let go of your arms, and -”

That’s the point you break free. One arm snaps loose in a cacophony of pink lights, and a vibration that you can feel all the way in your bones. ID hisses, eyes narrowing to slits as they flare with colour. But he reacts quickly. His psionics wrap around you, even as your leg kicks free, and then the other.

“Let go of my arms, leh?” you ask.

You’ll give him points! He’s trying. It’s like someone’s slinging yarn around your body, tying you in place, but your skin is fire, and your psi is iron. Every strand he places burns. He can’t replace them fast enough to keep you in the air, only fast enough to stop your fall, and falling you are, inch by inch, back to the ground.

It’s like walking through mud. All you have to do is keep lifting your legs. But you’re not expecting the latest strand to snap, your foot to hit the ground, and for him to dissolve the rest in one, vast cacophony of light in favour of shoving you straight in the back.

He’s on you before you even hit the ground. “Got you!” he crows, and lands an elbow hard into the back of your neck, then a foot in the center of your back. “Phone, sweetheart.”

“Aiyaaah, geddoff,” you snap, “touching my ports!”

He jolts back so quickly that you’d think you’d threatened to shoot him. When you roll over, then onto your knees, he looks like you might as well have. “Oh,” he says, aggrieved. If his ears could pin, they’d be flat. “Well -”

You don’t give him time to anwer. You just spring forward, hitting him right in the center of the body. He lands a palm hard in your face. It skids off of your shell, even as his nails curve in, try to secure a proper grip. This close, with his psionics curled in around it, it feels like the shriek of nails on a chalkboard. “Stop that!”

“Get off of me!”

“No!” you snap, and you drop your head, catching it hard under his chin. Finally - fucking finally - he drops.

And as soon as he’s on the ground, you’re pushing forward, dropping a knee onto his chest, one hand hard on his shoulder. He’s long and lanky, Vadaya’s pitch, with cheeks that’re flushed gold from exertion and eyes that are still streaming pink. If he could, you think, he might gut you for the indignity of this! But for all that you can feel his psionics pulsing over your skin, trying to find a crack in your shell, all the tech in your hide means it takes more than a power fucking five to break through.

“What /is/ this?” he huffs. “Is this a pitch overture? Because I know I’m irresistible, sweetheart, but there’s just no need for this sort of thing. Why, I don’t - don’t shake me!”

“Say stupid shit, lah, get shook. Want phone back? Say smart shit!”

Iconic huffs. Then he shakes his head, curls falling to the side. It’s, as far as things go, nice enough hair, but you can’t imagine this is why Vadaya likes him. “Is this a shovel talk?” he says, doubtful. “Because I don’t /think/ you’re quite the right quadrant for that, sweetheart -”

“If a shovel talk,” you tell him, “would be hitting you with it right now. Is question and answer, liao. Answer, get phone back, get up.”

“And what if I don’t?”

“If you don’t..” You lean forward. “Will sit Daya down,” you say, flat, “and show every single clip of you torturing people, yeah? Videos and videos and videos of people. Of wrigglers. You not nice, lah. Not nice at all! But Daya is. How you think he gonna feel, see you cull some gray-eyed /child/?”

“Watching you /laugh/ about /torturing/ some child?” you say.

He just looks at you.

“Let me tell you! We cull for work! For Empire. You -” You shake your head. “Cull because fun, lor,” you say, flat. “Cull because head damn pariah. You siao murder. He think that, he think you all song over dead pupas - will leave. Anyone normal would leave.”

He blows out his cheeks. And there he goes, looking young again. If you hadn’t seen the videos, you might feel bad. But even if his hair’s all loose and straggley, even if he’s peevish and embarrassed and childish underneath you, you’d watched the videos.

And the way he looks at you, pupils slits admist the sea of yellow, kills any sympathy you might’ve had. He isn’t ashamed. He just wants you to stop talking about it. “Fine,” he drawls, careless. “Fine, honeyhorns, don’t get your knickers in a knot on my account. What sort of questions did you even want to ask?”

“Why you do it?”

Of all the responses you wanted, you didn’t think he was going to laugh in your face.

“Oh, sugartits, why d'you think? Because it was fun,” he says, his lip crooking up. “Because it was fun, and I could, and it made sure people paid attention. Why the fuck wouldn’t I do it? Really, what you should be asking is why everyone else wasn’t.”

You don’t know what Vadaya sees in him at all.

“'kay. Like was saying, leh. Rule one! Always so chiong. Get chiong with Daya, boh pien, will take your head, yeah? Rule two! Get mean with Daya, will take your head. Rule three - eyes up here!” you snap, bumping your fist hard under his chin.

He curls his lip at you. “I was listening,” he protests, like he wasn’t eyeing up your shirt. Eyeing it down. Gods, you hate civilians. “I was just –”

You lean forward and slam your horns hard into his. He hisses, jolting back, but you’ve still got him pinned. “Aiyah, no backtalk,” you snap, a growl on the edge of your words, and the only thing that saves him from you hitting him again is the fact he doesn’t actually growl back. “Rule number three - play cock, lor, will take head, and every other bit with it, then you know. Can follow ar?”

“Oh, absolutely. You’re just saying Vadadear’s a delicate soul, so /senpai,/ be gen–”

Never mind. Nothing in the world could save him from you hitting his horns again.

“Stop that!” he snarls, high in the way only lowbloods get. His psionics are shoving at you, trying to get enough of a slide under you to throw you off entirely, but your claws are digging holes into his shoulder. If you go, he’ll go with you, and he doesn’t want to risk that. “Fine! I get it! Get off of me!”

But as soon as you let go, he’s shoving with all of his force, scuttling out from under you with a slide propelled by his psionics. He murmurs something under his breath, sharp, but when you look at him, he just flashes his fangs at you in something that could pass as a smile. “I get the picture, sweetheart! What, d'you want to go for round two?”

“Do you want your phone?”

He was running his hands through his bangs, like that’ll do anything to fix them, but now he pauses to look at you. You still don’t know why Vadaya chose him, of all people, as a quadrant. He’s just.. awful, you think, from top to bottom, from the way he slouches to the cold glint in his eyes. There’s skill in there! But there’s no kindness, no morals, no character, and it’s disconcerting to think what that means, that out of all the trolls in the world, this is the one that your battery leader chose to improve.

To be improved /by/.

But you don’t have to understand why he picked him. You just have to tolerate it, and make sure he tolerates you. So you yank the phone out of your pocket, tossing it high and far into the air.

Iconic jumps to snatch it, like a dog after a treat, and - gods, you hope /that’s/ not why Vadaya picked him.

“The screen’s broken!”

“Well, yeah,” you sniff. “Tossed me fucking around, siao, what you /expect?/ C'mon. Go to kopitiam, then drop at hive.”


End file.
